Exploring new tools to add to my toolbox

Make RoboClaw HTML Control UI Scale Across Different Screen Types with Bootstrap

The basic HTML UI we were using to learn how to work with a RoboClaw motion controller was bare-bones web 1.0 in style. This worked very well when it only had to let us experiment to understand the controller while it’s sitting on a test stand next to the development workstation computer.

Once we got ready to move beyond tethered desktop computer scenarios, though, we had a problem. We had two touchscreen scenarios: one for UI directly on the robot via the Raspberry Pi Foundation touchscreen, the second scenario is remote control using a cell phone or tablet’s web browser.

Because the UI content was written in bare HTML, it does not scale to touchscreen devices the way we expect all modern web sites to do. In order to make this happen, we had to bring our HTML from the relative stone ages to conform to current practices.

Fortunately, this project received help from someone who has recently completed training on web design and development. [Amy] volunteered to jump in and make the controller HTML presentable and usable on touchscreen devices. Thanks to the open source nature of the web, most of the hard work has already been done by others and we just need to pull in one of the many freely available libraries to help build an UI that can respond to changes in the web browser environment.

For this experiment, [Amy] pulled in Bootstrap then began retrofitting the control test UI so Bootstrap can perform its magic across the different types of screens.